Exhibit written and curated by Allison Chapin

“I tell people all the time here, we talk about enslavement as though it, it were a bump in the road, and I tell people, ‘it’s the road, it’s the actual road.’”

– Ta-Nehisi Coates

Introduction

Recently, several universities and colleges, including Brown, Yale, Georgetown, Emory, the University of Virginia, William & Mary, and Harvard – just to name a few – have received attention for something beyond national rankings: histories of their involvement with slavery. Now that this has become a subject of research and debate with increasing publicity, these institutions have had to decide how to confront their problematic pasts, and what further actions must be taken to ensure that this is not forgotten.

How do universities remember their own histories as intertwined with slavery (or not)? How does this history come to light? What methods have they used to confront this history? Do they seek to offer “resolutions”[i] to that history? Do universities choose to integrate such history into students’ education? If so, how? Have their approaches to these efforts managed to recognize the past while avoiding whitewashing or continued glorification of problematic figures? What sort of public history projects have emerged from any of these efforts? Specific to the Boston area, how is Harvard addressing its history as it relates to slavery?

Considering the entrenchment and permeation of slavery in the United States, both while it was “legitimate” (legal) and as its legacy resonates from 1865 into the present, many schools of higher learning have been and can be implicated in the “peculiar institution.” As a result, this essay will address a relatively small number of case studies, some at greater length than others, beginning with Brown University in Rhode Island, credited as the catalyst for other universities to begin exploring their own histories as they connect to slavery. This examination will be followed by Georgetown University in Washington, DC. The case studies will conclude with a more extensive discussion of Harvard University in Massachusetts. In examining the steps taken by these different universities, we can see the actions universities are willing to take to address their complicated and imperfect pasts, and what has yet to be done – including some possibilities that these institutions may be unwilling to pursue – that may spread awareness, as well as provide retrospective, and perhaps reparative, justice. Thus, this essay will conclude with a discussion of reparations and universities’ potential to utilize new information about their histories to make an impact upon their communities.

In 2001, Ruth Simmons assumed her role as Brown University’s first female president – and the first black president of an Ivy League school. In 2003, she established the school’s “Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice” to “examine and report on the university’s complicity in slavery and the slave trade.”[ii] The committee’s report states that there were two aspects to their charge:

Our primary task was to examine the University’s historical entanglement with slavery and the slave trade and to report our findings openly and truthfully. But we were also asked to reflect on the meaning of this history in the present, on the complex historical, political, legal, and moral questions posted by any present-day confrontation with past injustice. In particular, the president asked the committee ‘to organize academic events and activities that might help the nation and the Brown community think deeply, seriously, and rigorously about the questions raised’ by the national debate over reparations for slavery.[iii]

The committee found that Brown’s history, like many other institutions in the US, was deeply intertwined with the history of slavery. Enslaved Africans arrived in Rhode Island at some point after 1638, and although some legislation to ban slaves and the slave trade was passed in the 1600s, none was enforced: ten percent of the population of the colony was enslaved by the mid-1700s, and the majority of these enslaved people lived in Newport, “the colony’s premier port,” and South County, “home to a thriving plantation economy.”[iv] As had been the case in several Northern states, slavery existed in Rhode Island into the nineteenth century, with legislation granting gradual emancipation beginning in 1784. However, it would take about fifty years to fully take effect, as the last slaves in the state “disappeared, either through death, manumission, or sale out of state, in the early 1830s.”[v] Brown was established, as the College of Rhode Island, in 1764, twenty years before this gradual emancipation began, and the same year that Esek Hopkins sailed a slave ship called the Sally to West Africa, a ship owned by Nicholas Brown and Company. Hopkins was a ship captain who had also been the first commander-in-chief of the US Navy during the American Revolution, and a member of the Rhode Island state legislature. The Browns he sailed the ship for were four merchant brothers in Providence, involved in the slave trade – until the disastrous voyage of the Sally led three of them to quit the transatlantic trade, though not necessarily to quit their involvement in slavery overall.[vi] The Browns were major benefactors of the College of Rhode Island, hence the name change in 1804 (not after any of the brothers, but one of their sons, Nicholas Jr.; see Figure 1).

The Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation at Georgetown University was convened in September, 2015, by President John J. DeGioia, who charged its members with three jobs: “Make recommendations on how best to acknowledge and recognize the University’s historical relationship to the institution of slavery. Examine and interpret the history of certain Jesuits who started (and still run) the university, and their involvement in slavery.” Georgetown Jesuits enslaved black people for around 160 years, primarily on land in Maryland, multiplying their holdings – and therefore wealth – resulting in an estimated 400 slaves on those plantations at their peak.[xiii] However, as a result of university debts, the Jesuits required funds in 1838, so Fathers Thomas Mulledy and William McSherry sold 272 enslaved people for $115,000 to a Louisiana planter, Henry Johnson, and his business partner, Jesse Batey.[xiv] Knowledge of this event prompted protests on the Georgetown campus in 2015, especially since two halls on site were named after Mulledy and McSherry. As a temporary fix, the working group recommended that the halls be renamed “Freedom” and “Remembrance,” names which held until April 2017. The buildings were then officially dedicated in remembrance of the 272 sold, and renamed “Isaac Hawkins Hall” and “Anne Marie Becraft Hall.”[xv] The former was named for one of the enslaved men sold to Louisiana, and the latter for a free black woman who, in 1820 at the age of 15, started a school in Georgetown for black girls.[xvi]

Aside from this renaming, the working group made several other recommendations, including an apology from the university (also done at the renaming ceremony), engagement with the descendants of the 272,[xvii] memorialization, creation of an institute to foster research and learning about this history, investment in diversity, and engagement with the whole university.[xviii] There is also an online archive of information related to slavery at Georgetown, initiated by the Archives Subgroup of the working group, and the working group site says that since they released their report, they have “conducted archival research on the slaves, connected with their descendants, and hosted community dialogues and events, including a week-long symposium of events, performances, lectures, tours, and reflections in honor of D.C. Emancipation Day.”[xix] At the current time of writing this exhibit, it is too soon after the release of the working group’s report to know how many more of the recommendations will be followed by the university.

Efforts to recognize Harvard University’s complicity in slavery were directly inspired by the work done at Brown University, and began with a series of seminars, rather than a working group or steering committee. Initiated by Sven Beckert, a history professor at Harvard, the first seminar took place in 2007, followed by three others; across all four, 32 different students conducted research on the history of Harvard and slavery.[xx] Although they found several instances when members of Harvard’s community benefitted from slavery or chose not to protest, similar to the links found at Brown – along with similar people and moments when slavery was condemned by students, faculty, and others – we will focus on three particular connections here.

Just a couple of years ago, the Royall family’s association with Harvard caused intense debate, because of the symbols on the Law School’s shield. I will offer only a brief summary, as this subject has been elaborated on elsewhere.[xxi] Isaac Royall, Sr. (1677-1739) and Isaac Royall, Jr. (1719-1781) were involved with slavery in Antigua, where their sugar plantation allowed them to amass large amounts of wealth. This money allowed Isaac Jr. to give then-Harvard College land in Massachusetts to support a law professor.[xxii] In addition, when a shield for the Law School was designed in 1936, it included sheaves of wheat adapted from the Royall family crest. The controversy over this visual connection has led the Law School to terminate usage of the shield.[xxiii]

Another point of connection is to racial science, a popular, “logical” way of justifying slavery and, more broadly, racism. Louis Agassiz, originally from Switzerland, was a professor of the natural sciences at Harvard, and he had done a lot of work on the origin of animal species. He applied much of what he studied to humans, and also applied Christian beliefs to craft a theory of polygenesis, that is, white people were descended from Adam, but black people had entirely different origins. This theory “explained” the “inferiority” of Africans and legitimized their unequal treatment, especially slavery.[xxiv] Agassiz studied the bodies of African American slaves closely as a way of proving his theory. As a result, he had daguerreotypes made of many slaves (see Figure 3); rather than the intimate, self-orchestrated portraits we see of white people from that time period, these photographs are taken scientifically, with photos from all angles of the subjects stripped of their clothing – the better to examine their physical features.

Agassiz’s theories proved influential, even a hundred years after his death, and Harvard supported his work, largely through funding that, over the years, totaled over $80,000 or $2.1 million in today’s dollars.[xxvi] Harvard also benefitted from Agassiz, especially the $100,000 from the Massachusetts legislature, which funded the Museum of Comparative Zoology; this museum became part of Harvard in 1876.[xxvii]

At Harvard University’s conference on March 3, 2017, entitled “Universities and Slavery: Bound by History,” one of the photographs commissioned by Agassiz was used on the cover of conference programs, and as an image for the conference website and videos (see Figure 3). Liz Cohen, dean of the Radcliffe Institute (which hosted the conference), discussed the photograph and Agassiz in her welcome speech, stating that while Renty’s physical, catalogued story interested Agassiz, it is his personal story that interests “us.”[xxviii] Though we know only a small amount of information about him, Cohen says that it does not mean we should ever stop trying to learn more. She shares that two seminars at the school have focused on the Agassiz images, in 2012 and 2015, and compares the hidden aspect of the photos – they had been discovered in 1976 by museum staff – to the hiddenness of universities’ ties to slavery: always there, even if we do not notice, or care to do so.[xxix]

Finally, we turn to a slavery connection that stretches over greater distances. In Cuba, the Atkins family of Massachusetts owned a sugar plantation, called Soledad, which employed slaves even after slavery was abolished on the island in 1880.[xxx] Edwin Atkins and his general manager, J.S. Murray (from Pittsburgh), manipulated documents and terms of employment to continue legal bondage as long as possible.[xxxi] Not long after Atkins obtained Soledad (in 1884), his family started a sugar research station on the site, which became involved in broader botanical research.[xxxii] This is where Harvard enters the mix: the institution’s scientists traveled to the station to do research on tropical plants, and then in 1919, Atkins donated the land to Harvard.[xxxiii] The station then became the “Atkins Institute for Tropical Research to Harvard,” where many professors and students would go for research up until 1961 (not long after the revolution).[xxxiv] Another slave owner thus used wealth gained from using slaves to fund Harvard’s academic exploits. This history was also featured at the Harvard conference, explained by a Harvard alumnus who had taken one of Beckert’s seminars, Alexandra Rahman.[xxxv]

As a supplement to the conference and research conducted at Harvard, the university archives also set up an exhibit of archival documents that illustrate the permeation of slavery in Harvard’s history. Unfortunately, it seems that the exhibit (at least on an ordinary day) receives sparse visitation; when I made a trip there on March 30, 2017, I was the only person who was in the building for the exhibit. Perhaps many more visited when the conference took place.

As Ta-Nehisi Coates was the keynote speaker at the Harvard conference, reparations could not but be discussed. Although Coates explained that his own work has begun taking a different route, he and President Drew Gilpin Faust talked about the possibilities of what reparations might look like.[xxxvi] Ultimately, across the conference, whenever this topic surfaced, the response was the same: institutions should be responsible for something, should decide what works best for them, what works with their mission. Reparations – whether by that name or another – have looked different depending on the university, but also the same (in some ways). Symposia, conferences, seminars, working groups or steering committees, renaming buildings, making memorials, establishing scholarship funds, apologies…the list could go on. But not everyone has followed through, at least not yet, and it remains to be seen what sort of impact the reparations in place will have on society and on individuals who suffer from the legacy of slavery in our country. And some places still have to figure out how to implement their “new” knowledge in a way that will benefit not only themselves, but their communities – including the descendants of slaves, especially the very slaves who made those universities possible.